Listen to an audio version of this article.

In the summer of 2023, California legislators approved a bill banning discrimination on the grounds of caste. Defined in the bill as “an individual’s perceived position in a system of social stratification on the basis of inherited status,” caste is a central feature of life for hundreds of millions of people in India and beyond. The measure had been championed by California’s Dalit community. Once known as “untouchables,” Dalits occupy the bottommost rung of the Hindu hierarchy, and they have traditionally been confined to menial occupations on the fringes of Indian society, purely by virtue of their birth.

Dalits in California report that this ancient system has been imported to the United States where it remains prevalent in the Indian diaspora, including among those in the tech industry. “They say that in California this doesn’t exist,” declared the measure’s sponsor, State Senator Aisha Wahab. “If it doesn’t exist, then why do we have so many people advocating for the need of this bill?” (As if to corroborate Wahab’s allegations, Google had canceled a planned talk in 2022 by the Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan, in reaction to the vehement objections posted on internal Google message boards that denounced her as “Hinduphobic”—a common defense against claims of casteism.) Despite furious opposition from leading figures in California’s Hindu tech community—such as Asha Jadeja Motwani, widow of the engineer who helped craft the original Google search algorithm—by September the measure had passed both House and Senate with overwhelming bipartisan majorities and was sent to Governor Gavin Newsom for his signature. While Newsom deliberated, Dalit activists, led by Soundararajan, waged a monthlong hunger strike outside the state legislature. Then, in October, Newsom announced that he was vetoing the bill. It was unnecessary, he claimed, because any discrimination was already covered by existing civil-rights laws.

Newsom’s decision took many by surprise, but others knew better. A month earlier, the ambitious governor, widely considered a future Democratic presidential candidate, flew to Chicago, where Joe Biden’s campaign had convened major donors for a meeting of the Biden Victory Fund PAC. Among them was Ramesh Kapur, a wealthy Massachusetts entrepreneur, whose voice and checkbook carry weight in the firmament of Democratic Party fundraising. In Chicago, Kapur made it clear to Newsom that he faced an important choice: if he ever hoped to secure Kapur’s support, he had better make the right decision on the caste bill. Kapur was hoping to encourage competition between Newsom and Kamala Harris, whose mother was Indian. “I raised money for her when she ran for the Senate and the presidency,” Kapur told me. (His goal, he said, is to elect the first Indian-American president—“hopefully before I get reincarnated!”) “If you want to be our next president,” Kapur bluntly informed the governor, “veto the bill.”

Newsom received an equally unequivocal message from Ajay Jain Bhutoria, another major Biden fundraiser who had served as deputy finance chair of the Democratic Party. “We used very strong words,” Bhutoria, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, later recounted on Twitter,

telling him that definitely he has a bright future in national politics . . . But at the same time, if there’s a mistake made on his side, he loses the support of the community. And I think he got the message very loud and clear.

The ultimatum was decisive. Kapur said that Newsom emailed him three hours before going public: “I’m going to veto it.” Newsom’s move dashed the hopes of all who had fought for the bill, but it seems likely to reap him rich rewards. “Now that he has made that decision, he has become the champion of the Hindu cause,” Kapur told me over the phone from California, where he was busy organizing the first in a series of fundraisers for the governor in Silicon Valley, Chicago, and New Jersey. “Newsom is hot in the Indian-American community!”

Since July, Indian Americans have found a better champion. Days after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Kapur himself happily told me that “the whole community is excited, and united” around the news of Kamala Harris’s growing stack of endorsements. As the 2024 election shapes up to be the most expensive ever, with campaigns set to raise and spend at least $15 billion, doors are opening for an emerging lobby of Hindu donors up and down the ballot.

The Indian-American diaspora has been growing ever since passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed non-Europeans to settle en masse in the United States for the first time since the Twenties. Given that visa approval was in part skills-based, the influx of immigrants from India was weighted toward the well-educated, who were more likely than not to hail from one of India’s “upper castes.” This trend persisted after 1990, when legislation expanded access to temporary work visas; since then, the Indian-American community has grown to some 4.6 million people, two thirds of whom are Hindu or consider themselves close to Hinduism. The community has flourished economically, notably in the tech industry, where Indian-American CEOs proliferate, including the current bosses of Microsoft, Google, and IBM. A 2019 Pew Research Center study reported that 75 percent of Indian-American adults had a college degree, and that the median annual household income was $119,000. According to a 2020 Carnegie Endowment study, Indian Americans enjoy a standard of living twice that of average Americans. Politicians naturally see potential rich pickings in such a group. Josh Novotney, a Pennsylvania Republican political operative and lobbyist put it to me this way: “It’s extremely important in politics to always build relationships in new communities for both fundraising and for votes, and to also know what’s going on. So if you have the ability to tap into a community like that, it is very valuable.”

Domestic constituencies with strong overseas attachments have long been part of the American political landscape. The most obvious example is the pro-Israel lobby, feared and embraced across the political spectrum, with its deepest attachments in the Democratic Party. This year may be different. Since October 7—coincidentally the same day that Newsom announced his veto—the ongoing slaughter in Gaza has brought electoral peril for the Democrats. Polls report withering support across important components of the coalition that brought Biden to victory in 2020, especially among the Muslim community, which gave him up to 85 percent of its votes in that election, according to some polls. Although Hindus were less supportive of Biden than Muslims were in 2020 (25 percent went for Donald Trump, according to certain estimates, a slight uptick from 2016), some see their votes as the perfect replacement for the Democrats’ faltering Muslim coalition.

“We can make the difference!” Kapur exclaimed, brandishing a state-by-state breakdown of Hindu and Muslim populations to show that his fellow Hindus could deliver votes as well as money. Muslims outnumber Hindus in America, 3.5 million to 2.5 million. But in key swing states, the numbers Kapur presented to me, drawn mostly from 2014 data, almost balance out: Pennsylvania is home to 130,000 Hindus and 150,000 Muslims. In Georgia, the state’s 172,000 Hindus outnumber its 123,000 Muslims, while the 110,000 Hindus in Michigan provide some counterweight, Kapur implied, to the quarter million Muslims, many of whom are outraged by the Biden Administration’s support for Israel. In Nevada, Hindus outnumber Muslims by almost three to one, while in Virginia, Hindus have an edge of 200,000 to just under 170,000. During the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, both the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, and the Republican, Glenn Youngkin, paid attention to this voter pool and dutifully visited Hindu temples, but Youngkin reportedly made the stronger impression—he “listened deeply” to their concerns, as American Hindu Coalition chairman Shekhar Tiwari put it, especially their complaints about local schools’ efforts to promote diversity by modifying admissions policies at their expense. And Youngkin was not the first Republican to cultivate and enjoy Hindu support. In 2015, the Chicago billionaire industrialist Shalabh Kumar set up the Republican Hindu Coalition, which describes itself as “modeled after the highly successful Republican Jewish Coalition”; Steve Bannon was an honorary co-chair of the group. Kumar and his wife poured money into Trump’s 2016 election campaign, which was making major media buys in swing states. Trump even recorded a message in Hindi.

Kumar has reportedly extolled Indian prime minister Narendra Modi as his idol, but Modi has received hardly less fulsome tribute from Biden and Harris. Throughout his term, Biden and his administration fortified ties with Modi as an ally as relations with China grew ever more sour. Welcoming him to the White House last June, Biden effused about “two proud nations, whose love of freedom secured our independence, bound by the same words in our Constitution—the first three words: we the people.” He went on to pay tribute to the Indian diaspora as “a bridge between our nations,” citing the record number of Indian Americans serving in Congress (known as the “Samosa Caucus”), and remarked, “We see the pride of the community in our incredible vice president.” He hailed Harris as “the proud granddaughter of an Indian civil servant.” When Harris hosted Modi at a luncheon during the same visit, she recalled her childhood visits to what was then Madras, and celebrated Indian Americans’ impact on the economy. “As we look toward the future, the United States and India, the world’s oldest and largest democracies, instinctively turn to each other and are increasingly aligned,” she said. “Prime Minister Modi, you and I have both dedicated our careers to the noble work of public service.”

The praise for Modi as a fellow champion of shared democratic values was ironic, not least because U.S. intelligence and Justice Department officials were meanwhile concluding that officials in Modi’s government had actively plotted to murder a U.S. citizen, a Sikh-nationalist leader, on American soil. According to a detailed and well-sourced Washington Post exposé, the plot was directed from the highest levels of Indian intelligence, with the apparent blessing of officials close to Modi himself—all while Modi basked in Biden’s lavish encomium. (The Indian government has denied involvement.) In years past, there had been no such welcome mat for Modi in Washington. From 2005 to 2014, before he became prime minister, he was banned from even setting foot in the United States thanks to his alleged role, when he was chief minister of the northwestern state of Gujarat, in the incitement of a murderous anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 that killed upwards of a thousand people, some of whom were burned alive. Modi’s visa was restored only after he was elected prime minister in 2014 on the Hindu-supremacist program, known as Hindutva, that has defined both his entire political career and his extremist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Under Modi’s rule, millions of Muslim voters have become vulnerable to disenfranchisement through tendentiously applied citizenship laws. The majority-Muslim state of Kashmir has had its constitutionally guaranteed autonomy revoked, and its population has suffered harsh repression. Many of India’s 200 million Muslims live in fear of violent attacks, including lynchings, while bulldozers demolish their homes and mosques. (Hence the alarm among Muslims in Edison, New Jersey, home to nearly thirty thousand Indian Americans, when Modi supporters headed a 2022 Indian Independence Day parade with a bulldozer plastered with pictures of a leading Islamophobic BJP politician.) In this year’s Indian election campaign, Modi upped the ante, telling a roaring crowd at a rally in April that the opposing Congress Party would give resources to Muslims first. “They will gather all your wealth and distribute it among those who have more children. They will distribute among infiltrators,” he told them. “Do you think your hard-earned money should be given to infiltrators? Would you accept this?” As it turned out, Modi’s rabid rhetoric proved less appealing in the face of popular discontent over economic hardship and widening inequality. The BJP lost dozens of seats in the election and gave up its outright majority in Parliament. Nevertheless, he retained power and has shown little sign of abandoning his nationalist agenda. Significantly, Amit Shah—his closest political ally and an extreme hard-liner who has referred to Muslim immigrants as “termites” who should be “thrown into the Bay of Bengal, one by one”—was reappointed as minister of home affairs.

Modi’s nationalist program was shaped by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary group founded in the Twenties. Its agenda of Hindu supremacy directs antipathy toward India’s Muslim minority, deeming the population an alien presence that subjugated Hindus in a series of historical conquests. As M. S. Golwalkar, an RSS leader for more than thirty years, wrote in 1939:

To keep up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of the country of the Semitic races—the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested . . . a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.

Race pride, or Hindu supremacy, has endured as the nationalists’ core ideology, resting on an evocation of a mythical past in which Hinduism reigned supreme in India for thousands of years before Muslim incursion. As Modi, according to the Times of India, told a cheering audience of Indian Americans in Houston during his June 2023 visit: “India has regained the confidence that had been snatched from it during the thousand-year-long foreign occupation.”

Following independence and partition, India adopted an explicitly secular constitution that offered protections for religious minorities and other groups, and that banned discrimination by caste. But the RSS refused to recognize it, instead pursuing its own agenda through an alphabet soup of related groups collectively known as the Sangh Parivar. Then, in 1980, the RSS set up a political wing, the BJP, where Modi emerged as a leading light. The party soon found a potent issue in a sixteenth-century mosque in Uttar Pradesh supposedly occupying the site of the mythical birthplace of Rama, a principal deity in the Hindu pantheon. In 1992, the BJP fomented a riot in which a frenzied mob tore down the offending building. Ensuing pogroms killed some two thousand Muslims.

Over the following two decades, Modi solidified control of the party, finally scoring a definitive victory in the 2014 parliamentary elections. Later that year, his visa restored, he came to the United States and addressed an ecstatic crowd of nineteen thousand cheering Indian immigrants in Madison Square Garden. “You all have earned a lot of respect in America through your conduct, values, traditions, and ability,” he told them. “The Indian democracy witnessed an unprecedented turn of events, and you played a crucial role in the final outcome.”

In fact, the RSS and its BJP offshoot had been looking to mobilize overseas for a long time—at least since 1953, when an RSS leader exhorted the movement’s activists to launch a “world mission to propagate the Hindu notion of the world as a single family.” In the United States, groups such as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS)—the international wing of the RSS—and the World Hindu Council of America, whose parent organization was set up by RSS leaders in the Sixties, have hundreds of branches. In 2003, not long after the Gujarat anti-Muslim pogrom generated global condemnation of Hindu extremism, a group of second-generation Indian-American professionals founded the Hindu American Foundation (HAF). Its purpose, according to the attorney Suhag Shukla, one of the group’s co-founders and its executive director, is to combat misperceptions of Hindus in America. “Whether we look at the way that Hindus are portrayed in things as basic as social studies, teaching materials—the whole of Indian society is flattened to something that’s almost like an archaic museum piece that’s been unchanging,” Shukla told me. “That’s not an accurate reflection of what Indian society is or has been.”

But the new organization was closely connected in word and spirit to the RSS and its spin-offs. For example, the HAF co-founder Mihir Meghani, a California physician, had been an activist with the World Hindu Council of America. In 1998, the BJP’s official website featured Meghani’s essay “Hindutva: The Great Nationalist Ideology,” in which he paid tribute to the mobs that destroyed the mosque in 1992. The essay derided the edifice as a “dilapidated symbol of foreign dominance,” whose demolition thereby released “thousands of years of anger and shame, so diligently bottled up.” (Meghani has since denounced the essay.)

Evidently, countering what Shukla has called “negative reductive stereotypes” includes an aggressive defense of Indian government actions. In 2019, the progressive Democrat Pramila Jayapal (herself Indian-born) introduced to the House a resolution urging the Indian government to end mass detentions in Kashmir; after the HAF successfully lobbied to defeat it, the group announced that hindu american advocacy works! in a press release celebrating the defeat of the “anti-Hindu, anti-India resolution.” Away from Washington, the HAF works to promote its causes on the local level, such as in the campaign against the California caste-discrimination bill. “I personally edited the letters of a number of top-level CEOs that were writing to Governor Newsom saying, This is not going to be good for Californians,” Shukla told me.

The fight against unwelcome stereotypes extends to American classrooms. In 2016 in California, Hindu-nationalist groups claimed that sixth-grade textbooks were biased against Hindus and demanded they be revised to give a kindlier depiction of the caste system, and to downplay the role of patriarchy in India. The California Department of Education caved, voting unanimously to incorporate the proposed changes for nearly a dozen textbooks. The episode echoed a similar dispute a decade earlier, in which a group of South Asian academics protested the whitewashing of Indian history in state textbooks. One of those scholars, Michael Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, was attacked at the time as a “Hitler” by those who were leading the charge to amend the materials.

Attacks on academics are a recurring feature of the assertive Hindu-nationalist agenda, in which any scholarly analysis of ancient Indian history or the roots of Hinduism that challenges the nationalists’ preferred version promptly elicits menacing personal vitriol. Thus the Rutgers professor Audrey Truschke, a specialist in premodern Sanskrit texts and South Asian history, has required armed police protection during lectures and public appearances for fear of animus against her critiques of the nationalist agenda. She summarizes the Hindu-supremacist worldview as “simply fascist,” a characterization which has garnered her a lawsuit from the Hindu American Foundation, pegged to her endorsement via Twitter of two Al Jazeera articles critiquing the HAF and related nationalist groups. The suit was dismissed by a U.S. District Court judge in 2022, but the attacks on Truschke continued. “I wake up and read my hate mail,” she told me in April. “Death threats, misogynist attacks, anti-Semitic attacks—even though I’m not Jewish—threats to rape my daughters. It would probably be unsafe for me ever to return to India.” Nevertheless, she continues to speak out: “I want to show them I’m not scared.”

The rise of Hindu-nationalist influence in the United States inevitably invites comparison with the pro-Israel lobby, an acknowledged source of inspiration. As Shukla explained to me, Meghani “had already been doing a lot of work with the Jewish community,” learning from its success in shaping and promoting a favorable narrative. As Israel’s political influence comes under increasing challenge, it still enjoys vociferous support from the Hindu-nationalist community.

In this year’s Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s twelfth congressional district, for example, Representative Summer Lee, a progressive Democrat and unequivocal defender of Palestinian rights, was opposed by a local councilor, Bhavini Patel. Pro-Israel groups had spent $5 million in the 2022 election in a failed attempt to defeat Lee. This time AIPAC stood aside, but Patel was backed not only by a “Moderate PAC”—funded to the tune of $800,000 by the Republican billionaire Jeffrey Yass, a staunch supporter of Israeli causes—but by leaders in the Hindu-nationalist lobby. Meghani himself co-hosted a Patel fundraiser in January. (Ramesh Bhutada, another of the hosts, is vice president of the HSS.) “We are making really strong efforts within the Jewish community, within the Hindu community, to encourage people registered as independents and Republicans to reregister as Democrats for the primary,” Patel declared at the January fundraiser. Support for Israel, and denunciations of the progressive Squad, were major themes of her campaign. “If we don’t get Bhavini elected, we’re gonna have ten to twenty years of someone like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib,” Meghani told donors during the fundraiser. “This is our chance.” The effort, as it turned out, fell short; Lee scored a crushing victory in the April primary, owing in large part to her strong local popularity and success in delivering benefits for the district while in office.

These uncompromising campaign interventions go back further. In July 2020, a Chicago City Council alderman introduced a resolution urging the city government “to reject violence in the name of any faith.” It cited attacks on India’s Muslims and compared Modi’s program to the “bigoted policies” of Trump. City councils across the country routinely pass such worthy but toothless resolutions, but this one quickly drew well-organized opposition from not only the American Jewish Committee but also the Islamophobic think tank Middle East Forum. A group set up by the Illinois Hindu activist Bharat Barai, an oncologist who had hosted Modi on earlier U.S. visits, spread word that the resolution was inspired by “extremists” linked to Hamas and spoke to a professional lobbyist to work for its defeat. The mayor’s office, under pressure from the Indian Consulate General, watered down the resolution. Drawn-out negotiations produced an anodyne version shorn of references to Trump and Muslim lynchings, merely decrying discrimination. Even this was not enough. When the truncated measure finally came up for a vote, it was defeated decisively.

Barai has exerted influence far beyond Illinois. In 2013, he discerned the potential of an ambitious young politician from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard, who had been elected to Congress for the first time on a progressive platform in 2012. Though not of Indian descent, Gabbard identified as Hindu—her mother was a convert. Those on the left who would cheer her opposition to U.S. military interventions paid little attention to the implications of her religious affiliation, but it was enough to loosen purse strings. Along with other notable figures in U.S.-based groups, Barai began making sizable donations to her campaigns. When asked by the journalist Pieter Friedrich why he backed a progressive after previously supporting a Tea Party congressman, Barai replied: “It doesn’t matter to me whether it is a Republican or Democrat.”

Barai’s push for Gabbard was a shrewd investment, especially at a time when Modi’s right-wing agenda and the violence of his supporters was attracting unwelcome attention in the U.S. Congress. In November 2013, a bipartisan group of House members introduced a resolution warning that “strands of the Hindu nationalist movement have advanced a divisive and violent agenda that has harmed the social fabric of India.” Gabbard struck back, declaring it “critically important that we focus on strengthening the ties between the two nations, and I do not believe that [the resolution] accomplishes this.” Her stand reaped dividends all around. The HAF applauded her opposition to the “anti-India” resolution, while, according to Friedrich’s analysis of Federal Election Commission data, pro-Modi donors poured no less than $123,000 into her 2014 reelection campaign—almost a quarter of her total war chest. At her wedding in 2015, attended by a host of Sangh luminaries, an attendee read out a letter of congratulations allegedly from Modi himself. But after a failed presidential run in 2020, Gabbard has faded from the spotlight, and donors like Barai have moved on.

Other politicians in receipt of Barai’s largesse continue to flourish in the mainstream, notably the suburban Chicago congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi, to whom Barai and his wife have donated at least $32,000. A leader in the Samosa Caucus and endorsed by the HAF, Krishnamoorthi spoke at a gathering of RSS-related U.S. groups, as part of a 2019 Chicago celebration of the founding of the RSS, on a stage adorned with a portrait of the Nazi sympathizer Golwalkar. He faces no serious challenge for his seat this year, but has nonetheless raised a pot of at least $16 million. He has emerged as an outspoken hawk regarding China, serving as the senior Democrat on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, while co-sponsoring the bill to bar Chinese ownership of TikTok, which has been banned in India since 2020.

Representative Ro Khanna, first elected in 2016 in a district that includes most of Silicon Valley, has taken a subtler approach. Making his name as a progressive, especially as an articulate critic of Pentagon spending and foreign wars, he has been sharply critical of the Hindu-nationalist agenda, calling in 2019 for “every American politician of Hindu faith to reject Hindutva.” But Khanna appears to have since shifted his position. Four years after his denunciation of Hindutva, he urged to have Modi address a joint session of Congress during his June 2023 state visit, an event boycotted by several of his fellow progressives. That same year, he and Krishnamoorthi sponsored legislation to fast-track weapons sales to India.

Along with Patel, the Hindu American PAC has this year endorsed not only a host of Democrats running for congressional and state offices, but also Republicans, such as the Georgia congressman Rich McCormick, hailed by the group for his stand on “Hinduphobia and Pakistan-supported terrorism against Indians in Kashmir.” (Not coincidentally, McCormick’s district includes, in his words, “almost a hundred thousand” immigrants from India, including “one out of every five doctors.”) David Brog is another Republican endorsed by the PAC as a candidate for the Nevada state assembly. A distant cousin of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, he is the co-founder of the hugely influential Christians United for Israel and a fervent advocate for a “Jewish–Hindu alliance . . . there’s no community in America with whom we share more than the Hindu-American community.”

Had there ever been doubts about the significance of the Hindu community in American politics, they have surely been allayed by the tumultuous events of this year’s election cycle; overall, the political effort of this lobby’s influence is bipartisan. Vivek Ramaswamy, scion of an upper-caste immigrant family from Kerala, vied for the Republican nomination. Now, a “proud granddaughter of an Indian civil servant” is the Democratic presidential nominee, and Usha Chilukuri Vance, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, may be headed for the vice presidential mansion as Second Lady. There can be little doubt that this community, endowed with wealth, organization, and potent political connections, will continue to grow in influence, becoming its own political bulldozer.